Direct Instruction

The learning intention for this lesson was to form and communicate ideas about a topic.

The video shows a brief introduction to students followed by discussions students are having in their groups during the collaborative brainstorming.

Extended plan here

Reflection

You can hear me quite a bit in the background of the video (particularly at the start). I had some members of the class who had been out of the class and so I was catching these students up to where the rest of the class were up to. One of the most insiteful things about this movie was observing the lack of depth in student discussions. The students were still very much working on this task independently rather than effectively in their groups. I would have liked the students to be asking each other more questions, querying comments and pushing their thinking even deeper.

This is a great finding as it is clear that in future, I need to be providing students with more explicit goals when working in their groups. For example, asking questions or adding to someone else's idea.

Things to note

This lesson cut short at the end as we had a special assembly that was happening at a different time to our normal school assembly time. Some members of the class had to leave 10 minutes early to lead the set up for the assembly.